A River in Darkness

I've read several North Korea related survival/escape stories. This one reads differently. There's a certain level of anger, straight-forwardness and a different point of view that emerges as a result of the writer being half-Korean, half-Japanese, and having witnessed a better life before ending up in the living hell of North Korea. Highly engaging and always disturbing reading.

As Chapter One closes, thirteen-year-old Ishikawa is boarding a train with his family; it is impossible not to be reminded of other mid-twentieth-century trains, European ones, the difference being that everyone in the latter cases had a fair idea of what lay ahead.

This book is tragedy beyond anything you or I have ever experienced or can imagine, compounded by the knowledge that it is happening in the present day. Ishikawa's narrow personal focus gives the reader perspective that no amount of newspaper coverage could; we are slammed on every page with nonstop daily suffering. And even though there's nothing we can do to help - not the author, not his family, not North Koreans - we can learn much from this book: about compassion, gratitude, and perhaps even about how to be skeptical of empty promises by narcissistic tyrants; how to avoid taking our own children onto those trains.

Masaji Ishikawa's family moved to North Korea around 1960, to escape prejudice in Japan. Immediately, it became obvious that this was not the communist paradise they had been promised: far from enjoying good lodging and free education, people were fighting for basic needs like food and shelter.
Ishikawa's memoir is short but powerful, giving one person's glimpse of life in the last Stalinist totalitarian regime from the 1960s through the 1990s. The style is plain and direct, with frequent interjections of opinion, which give the impression that we are hearing him tell his story in a bar somewhere.
By the same token, this is not a scholarly book: it doesn't talk much about how North Korean society works, what the different classes or castes are, how it came to be this way, or how such a regime manages to continue to exist without collapsing. And to be honest, some of the anecdotes, like the government executing successful innovators for fear that they might challenge Kim's grip on power, seem cartoonishly evil; the sort of thing I might have dismissed if I hadn't grown up hearing similar things about Stalin's regime.
Likewise, a lot of what Ishikawa tells us about how society operates is hearsay: "everyone knew that" you couldn't get cabbage unless you knew someone in the party, for instance. But he's not trying to be fair or impartial; he's trying to tell his story and that of his family.
In the end, I feel I understand North Korea better. But I'll want to read a different book to complement this one.